Max Payne 3 — Max in green light, a submachine gun raised beside his face

Max Payne art and media: cover art, comics, soundtracks and memes

The Max Payne 3 cover and trailers, the comic panels of the first two games, and the art and music of the series with the people who made them.

The comic panels The soundtrack

Pictured: a Max Payne 3 (2012) screenshot, not the cover

Covers

Covers, logo and font

Described, not shown — they belong to their owners

The Max Payne 3 cover went public on March 7, 2012, two months before the game reached shelves. It updates art first shown in fall 2011: São Paulo and its helicopters behind a scarred Max, and a local woman in the picture with him.

The series logo sits on Wikimedia Commons, taken from Remedy’s page for the remake and marked as a possible trademark. A font blog names Adobe’s Machine Medium as the typeface of the logo.

Graphic novel

A story told in comic panels

The first two games, and the Max Payne 3 comics

Both Remedy games let comic-book panels with voice-over carry most of the story. For Max Payne 2 the developers explained why: panels cost less than animated cutscenes, worked better, could be reshuffled when the plot changed and let each player read a frame their own way. Sam Lake modeled for Max in the first game, actor Timothy Gibbs in the second, where a face stuck on one expression gained a wider range, including a smirk and moving eyebrows.

Around the launch of Max Payne 3, a three-part comic series made with Marvel Custom Solutions went back over the first two games and Max’s past. It was collected as Max Payne 3: The Complete Series in October 2013.

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne — Max and Mona Sax side by side, both armed

Art

Screenshots, concept art and prints

Where the images come from

The frames on this site are screenshots and key art from the games’ Steam pages, toned to the site’s colors. Max Payne 2, with Saku Lehtinen credited as its artist, took the 2004 Golden Satellite Award for Outstanding Art Direction.

For Max Payne 3, Wikipedia lists artists Paul MacPherson, Joshua Bass and Rob Nelson, and Anthrox Studio credits itself with pre-development concept art and marketing art direction built on photo shoots with actors. The Special Edition came with still-life art prints.

Max Payne — Max runs down a snow-covered New York street at night, past police barricades and an NYPD mobile arrest bus

Soundtrack

From Late Goodbye to HEALTH

The music of all three games

Kärtsy Hatakka and Kimmo Kajasto scored the first two games. Max Payne 2 adds cello by Perttu Kivilaakso of Apocalyptica and ends on Late Goodbye by Poets of the Fall, its words adapted from a Sam Lake poem.

The music of Max Payne 3 is mostly the work of the Los Angeles noise-rock band HEALTH. The album came out on May 23, 2012, the launch trailer carried MAX: THEME, and at the 2012 Spike Video Game Awards the score was nominated for Best Score and TEARS for Best Song in a Game.

Max Payne 3 — Max, bald and bearded, in a tropical shirt above a São Paulo favela

Trailers and memes

Trailers, memes and GIFs

What the internet did with Max

The debut trailer of Max Payne 3 came out on September 14, 2011. In one TheGamer roundup of ten Max Payne memes, three are about his painkillers: pills that fix a gunshot wound, and how many he takes. Tenor keeps a GIF of Max yelling “goddamnit” from Max Payne 3.

The publisher’s channel on YouTube

Rockstar Games keeps its own channel there. We link to it rather than embed anyone’s video.

Rockstar Games on YouTube